Even though they succeeded in making the deliveries, they did not get the contract. They went bankrupt after the Transcontinental Telegraph opened in October 1861, as its competition eliminated the need for some mail service.

He provided rail ties for the crews of the Union Pacific Railroad working on the First Transcontinental Railroad. After the railroad was completed, he continued to haul freight to towns not yet served by the railroad.

Contents

Alexander Majors (left) is honored with Kansas City "father" John Calvin McCoy and Mountainman James Bridger at Pioneer Square in Westport in Kansas City.

In 1848 Alexander Majors started hauling overland freight on the Santa Fe Trail. On his first trip, he set a new time record of 92 days for the 1564-mile (2500 km) round trip. Eventually he employed 4,000 men, including a 15-year-old lad named Billy Cody, later known as Buffalo Bill. Cody became one of his most famous Pony Express riders.

Majors helped establish the Kansas City stockyards, which became a center of shipping beef to the East Coast and Midwest.

In 1854 he teamed up with William B. Waddell and William Hepburn Russell. Majors was responsible for the freighting part of the business, Waddell was to manage the office, and Russell was to use his Washington DC contacts to acquire new contracts. Waddell chose be a silent partner, so the firm was initially called "Majors and Russell". In the 1850s their firm Russell, Majors and Waddell and the short-lived Pony Express were major businesses, contributing to the growth of Kansas City.

Majors' Overland Stage Company was part of a wide network that reached into the frontier West. Fifteen years later, it was all over.

On the Missouri side of State Line at 81st Street, Majors built his two-story frame farmhouse in 1855. (His house is now operated as a museum.) There, wagon trains loaded with goods from his warehouse down on the river headed west. In Westport, Majors operated a meat-packing plant. It supplied the trains with cured pork, soap and candles. For 15 years Majors and his far-flung interests were highly successful.

In 1860 his Pony Express began. But by then, technology was already threatening. Telegraphs and railroads were a reality. The telegraph spelled doom for Pony Express, and the "great iron horse" killed Majors' freighting and stage coach operations in time.

By 1865 Majors sold out what little remained and moved to Colorado. There, 30 years later, his former young wagonmaster and Pony Express rider, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, found him. He was old, ill and penniless. Cody helped him, taking Majors on as part of the Cody Wild West show. Majors lived at Cody's Scouts' Rest Ranch in North Platte, Nebraska for a time.

Majors died in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, on January 13, 1900, aged 86, and is buried in Union Cemetery in Kansas City, MO.[1]

1.
Chicago
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Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago also has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad, manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage

2.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci

3.
Pony Express
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The Pony Express was a mail service delivering messages, newspapers, and mail. Waddell, all of whom were notable in the freighting business, during its 19 months of operation, it reduced the time for messages to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to about 10 days. The idea of a fast mail route to the Pacific coast was prompted largely by Californias newfound prominence, after gold was discovered there in 1848, thousands of prospectors, investors and businessmen made their way to California, at that time a new territory of the U. S. By 1850, California entered the Union as a free state, by 1860, the population had grown to 380,000. The demand for a way to get mail and other communications to. In the late 1850s, William Russell, Alexander Majors, and they were already in the freighting and drayage business. At the peak of the operations, they employed 6,000 men, owned 75,000 oxen, thousands of wagons, and warehouses plus a sawmill, a plant, a bank. Russell was a prominent businessman, well respected among his peers, Waddell was co-owner of the firm Morehead, Waddell & Co. After Morehead was bought out and retired, Waddell merged his company with Russells, in 1855 they took on a new partner, Alexander Majors, and founded the company of Russell, Majors & Waddell. They held government contracts for delivering supplies to the western frontier. The initial price was set at $5 per 1⁄2 ounce, then $2.50, the founders of the Pony Express hoped to win an exclusive government mail contract, but that did not come about. Russell, Majors, and Waddell organized and put together the Pony Express in two months in the winter of 1860, the undertaking assembled 120 riders,184 stations,400 horses, and several hundred personnel during January and February 1861. Alexander Majors was a man and resolved by the help of God to overcome all difficulties. He presented each rider with a special edition Bible and required this oath, the Pony Express demonstrated that a unified transcontinental system of communications could be established and operated year-round. When replaced by the telegraph, the Pony Express quickly became romanticized and its reliance on the ability and endurance of individual young, hardy riders and fast horses was seen as evidence of rugged American individualism of the Frontier times. From 1866 until 1889, the Pony Express logo was used by stagecoach and freight company Wells Fargo, the United States Postal Service used Pony Express as a trademark for postal services in the US. Freight Link international courier services, based in Russia, adopted the Pony Express trademark, in 1860, there were about 157 Pony Express stations that were about 10 miles apart along the Pony Express route. At each station stop the rider would change to a fresh horse

4.
Kansas City, Missouri
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Kansas City is the largest city in Missouri and the sixth largest city in the Midwest. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the city had an population of 475,378 in 2015. It is the city of the Kansas City metropolitan area. Kansas City was founded in the 1830s as a Missouri River port at its confluence with the Kansas River coming in from the west, on June 1,1850 the town of Kansas was incorporated, shortly after came the establishment of the Kansas Territory. Confusion between the two ensued and the name Kansas City was assigned to them soon thereafter. Most of the city lies within Jackson County, but portions spill into Clay, Cass, along with Independence, it serves as one of the two county seats for Jackson County. Major suburbs include the Missouri cities of Independence and Lees Summit and the Kansas cities of Overland Park, Olathe, and Kansas City. The city is composed of neighborhoods, including the River Market District in the north, the 18th and Vine District in the east. Kansas City is also known for its cuisine, its craft breweries, Kansas City, Missouri was officially incorporated as a town on June 1,1850, and as a city on March 28,1853. The territory straddling the border between Missouri and Kansas at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers was considered a place to build settlements. The Antioch Christian Church, Dr. James Compton House, the first documented European visitor to Kansas City was Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont, who was also the first European to explore the lower Missouri River. Criticized for his response to the Native American attack on Fort Détroit, Bourgmont lived with a Native American wife in a village about 90 miles east near Brunswick, Missouri, where he illegally traded furs. In the documents, he describes the junction of the Grande Riv des Cansez and Missouri River, French cartographer Guillaume Delisle used the descriptions to make the areas first reasonably accurate map. The Spanish took over the region in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French continued their fur trade under Spanish license. After the 1804 Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark visited the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, in 1831, a group of Mormons from New York settled in what would become the city. They built the first school within Kansas Citys current boundaries, but were forced out by mob violence in 1833, in 1833 John McCoy established West Port along the Santa Fe Trail,3 miles away from the river. In 1834 McCoy established Westport Landing on a bend in the Missouri to serve as a point for West Port. Soon after, the Kansas Town Company, a group of investors, began to settle the area, in 1850, the landing area was incorporated as the Town of Kansas

5.
Butterfield Overland Mail
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The Butterfield Overland Mail Trail was a stagecoach service in the United States, operating from 1857 to 1861. Mail from two eastern termini, Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri to San Francisco, California. The routes from each eastern terminus met at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and then continued through Indian Territory, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Baja California, and California ending in San Francisco. On March 3,1857, Congress under James Buchanan authorized the U. S. postmaster general, Aaron Brown, to contract for delivery of the U. S. mail from Saint Louis to San Francisco. Mail bound for the Far West had been transported by ship across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, through the 1840s and 1850s there was a desire for better communication between the east and west coasts of the US. Though there were proposals for railroads connecting the two coasts, a more immediate realization was an overland mail route across the west. Congress authorized the Postmaster General to contract for service from Missouri to California to facilitate settlement in the west. The Post Office Department advertised for bids for a mail service on April 20,1857. Bidders were to propose routes from the Mississippi River westward, John W. Butterfield and his associates William B. Dinsmore, William G. Fargo, James V. P. Gardner, Marcus L. Kinyon, Alexander Holland, the Post Office Department received nine bids. The Postmaster General, Brown, was from Tennessee and favored a southern route and this route was 600 miles longer than the central and northern routes through Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah, but was snow free. The bid and route was awarded to Butterfield and his associates, at that time it was the largest land-mail contract ever awarded in the US. Post Office, which went into effect on September 16,1858, identified the route, Franklin, Texas later to be named El Paso was the dividing point and these two were subdivided into minor divisions, five in the East and four in the West. These minor divisions were numbered west to east from San Francisco, as noted above, the route from San Francisco to Fort Smith was the same for both routes. Travel time from Fort Smith to Memphis was about the same as to St. Louis, management of the route from Fort Smith to Memphis was included in Division 8. However, because of the nature of the Mississippi River and its Arkansas tributaries in those years. From there the route headed overland by stagecoach, when the Arkansas was too low for steamboat traffic, the Butterfield could take the White River to Clarendon, Arkansas or Des Arc, Arkansas before switching to the stagecoaches. Sometimes the entire route across eastern Arkansas would be by stage, the Butterfield Overland Mail Company held the U. S

6.
Salt Lake City
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Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and the most populous municipality of the U. S. state of Utah. With an estimated population of 190,884 in 2014, the city lies at the core of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, Salt Lake City is further situated within a larger metropolis known as the Salt Lake City-Ogden-Provo Combined Statistical Area. This region is a corridor of contiguous urban and suburban development stretched along an approximately 120-mile segment of the Wasatch Front and it is one of only two major urban areas in the Great Basin. The city was founded in 1847 by Brigham Young, Isaac Morley, George Washington Bradley and numerous other Mormon followers, who extensively irrigated and cultivated the arid valley. Due to its proximity to the Great Salt Lake, the city was originally named Great Salt Lake City—the word great was dropped from the name in 1868 by the 17th Utah Territorial Legislature. Today, however, less than half the population of Salt Lake City proper are members of the LDS Church. It was traversed by the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway, in 1913, Salt Lake City has since developed a strong outdoor recreation tourist industry based primarily on skiing, and hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics. It is the banking center of the United States. Before Mormon settlement, the Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute had dwelt in the Salt Lake Valley for thousands of years. The land was treated by the United States as public domain, the first U. S. explorer in the Salt Lake area is believed to be Jim Bridger in 1825, although others had been in Utah earlier, some as far north as the nearby Utah Valley. Frémont surveyed the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Lake Valley in 1843 and 1845, the Donner Party, a group of ill-fated pioneers, had traveled through the Great Salt Lake Valley in August 1846. The first permanent settlements in the date to the arrival of the Latter-day Saints on July 24,1847. Upon arrival at the Salt Lake Valley, president of the church Brigham Young is recorded as stating, This is the right place, Brigham Young claimed to have seen the area in a vision prior to the wagon trains arrival. They found the broad valley empty of any human settlement, four days after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young designated the building site for the Salt Lake Temple, which would eventually become a famous Mormon and Salt Lake City landmark. The Salt Lake Temple, constructed on the block that would later be called Temple Square, construction started in 1853, and the temple was dedicated on 6 April 1893. The temple has become an icon for the city and serves as its centerpiece, in fact, the southeast corner of Temple Square is the initial point of reference for the Salt Lake Meridian, and for all addresses in the Salt Lake Valley. The Mormon pioneers organized a new state called Deseret and petitioned for its recognition in 1849, the United States Congress rebuffed the settlers in 1850 and established the Utah Territory, vastly reducing its size, and designated Fillmore as its capital city. Great Salt Lake City replaced Fillmore as the capital in 1858

7.
First Transcontinental Railroad
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The rail line was built by three private companies over public lands provided by extensive US land grants. Construction was financed by state and US government subsidy bonds as well as by company issued mortgage bonds. The Western Pacific Railroad Company built 132 mi of track from Oakland/Alameda to Sacramento, the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California constructed 690 mi eastward from Sacramento to Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. And the Union Pacific built 1,085 mi from the eastern terminus at Council Bluffs near Omaha. The railroad opened for traffic on May 10,1869 when CPRR President Leland Stanford ceremonially drove the gold Last Spike with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit. The coast-to-coast railroad connection revolutionized the settlement and economy of the American West and it brought the western states and territories into alignment with the northern Union states and made transporting passengers and goods coast-to-coast considerably quicker and less expensive. Paddle steamers linked Sacramento to the cities and their facilities in the San Francisco Bay until 1869. The roads rail terminus was moved two months later to the Oakland Long Wharf about a mile to the north, Service between San Francisco and Oakland Pier continued to be provided by ferry. The CPRR eventually purchased 53 miles of UPRR-built grade from Promontory Summit to Ogden, the transcontinental line was popularly known as the Overland Route after the principal passenger rail service that operated over the length of the line until 1962. In 1847 he submitted to the U. S. Congress a Proposal for a Charter to Build a Railroad from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean, Congress agreed to support the idea. Under the direction of the Department of War, the Pacific Railroad Surveys were conducted from 1853 through 1855 and these included an extensive series of expeditions of the American West seeking possible routes. A report on the explorations described alternative routes and included an amount of information about the American West. It included the natural history and illustrations of reptiles, amphibians, birds. The report failed however to include detailed maps of potential routes needed to estimate the feasibility, cost. This in part motivated the United States to complete the Gadsden Purchase, the U. S. Congress was strongly divided on where the eastern terminus of the railroad should be—in a southern or northern city. Three routes were considered, A northern route roughly along the Missouri River through present-day northern Montana to Oregon Territory and this was considered impractical due to the rough terrain and extensive winter snows. A central route following the Platte River in Nebraska through to the South Pass in Wyoming, following most of the Oregon Trail, snow on this route remained a concern. A southern route across Texas, New Mexico Territory, the Sonora desert, connecting to Los Angeles, surveyors found during a 1848 survey that the best route lay south of the border between the United States and Mexico

8.
Jim Bridger
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He was of English ancestry, and his family had been in North America since the early colonial period. Jim Bridger had a constitution that allowed him to survive the extreme conditions he encountered walking the Rocky Mountains from what would become southern Colorado to the Canada–US border. He had conversational knowledge of French, Spanish and several native languages and he would come to know many of the major European American explorers of the early west, including Kit Carson, George Armstrong Custer, Hugh Glass, John Frémont, Joseph Meek, and John Sutter. Bridger was a contemporary of British and American pathfinders including Peter Skene Ogden, Jedediah Smith. In 1830, Smith and his associates sold their fur company to Bridger, Bridger was part of the second generation of mountain men and pathfinders who explored the American West that followed the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. James Felix Bridger was born on March 17,1804, in Richmond and his father, James Bridger, was an innkeeper in Richmond, and his mother was James wife Chloe. About 1812 his parents and the young Bridger moved to the vicinity of St. Louis, at the age of 13 Bridger was orphaned when both his parents died. Receiving no formal education, unable to read or write, Bridger was apprenticed to a blacksmith, Bridger remained illiterate for the rest of his life. Ashleys expedition included fur trapping on the sources of the Missouri River, while continuing his fur trapping venture and employment on the Ashley expedition, the young Bridger played a significant role in the ordeal of Hugh Glass. On June 2,1823 Ashleys men were attacked by Arikara warriors along the Missouri River, fifteen men were killed and the rest of the fur trappers fled down the river and hid in shelters until U. S. military support defeated the Arikara. In August 1823, near the forks of the Grand River in present-day Perkins County, South Dakota, while scouting for game for the expeditions larder, the bear charged, picked him up, and threw him to the ground. Glass shot into the air to scare the bear away and save his trapping partners, Ashley asked for two volunteers to stay with Glass until he died and then bury him. Bridger and John Fitzgerald stepped forward, and as the rest of the party moved on, later claiming that they were interrupted by attacking Arikara Native Americans, the pair grabbed Glasss rifle, knife, and other equipment, and took flight. Bridger and Fitzgerald later caught up with the party and incorrectly reported to Ashley that Glass had died, despite his injuries, Glass regained consciousness. After recovering, Glass set out again to find Fitzgerald and Bridger and he eventually found Bridger at the mouth of the Bighorn River, but apparently forgave him because of his youth. Glass later found Fitzgerald and reportedly spared Fitzgeralds life because of the penalty for killing a soldier of the United States Army, Bridger was among the first white men to see the geysers and other natural wonders of the Yellowstone region. In the winter of 1824-1825, Bridger gained fame as the first European American to see the Great Salt Lake, due to its saltiness, he believed it to be an arm of the Pacific Ocean. In 1843, Bridger and Louis Vasquez built a trading post, later named Fort Bridger, in 1835 he married a woman from the Flathead Indians tribe with whom he had three children

9.
Santa Fe Trail
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The Santa Fe Trail was a 19th-century transportation route through central North America that connected Independence, Missouri with Santa Fe, New Mexico. Pioneered in 1821 by William Becknell, it served as a commercial highway until the introduction of the railroad to Santa Fe in 1880. Santa Fe was near the end of the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro which carried trade from Mexico City. Comanche raiding farther south in Mexico isolated New Mexico, making it dependent on the American trade. The Trail was used as the 1846 U. S. invasion route of New Mexico during the Mexican–American War, the road route is commemorated today by the National Park Service as the Santa Fe National Historic Trail. The trail was used to manufactured goods from the state of Missouri in the United States to Santa Fe. Santa Fe was near the terminus of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. This limited trade traffic transited the site that would become Fort Bent in Colorado and this post was only eight miles east of the site of Fort John on what became the Oregon Trail. The lost fort was on the site where Fort Bernard was later founded in the eastern Oregon Country. That Fort Bernard ran cargo mule trains to the Santa Fe is historically certain, the earlier Fort and its traders are less so, and that gives weight that they might have been independents, and not employees of the large fur companies. Regardless of the lack of documents, it is known the light trading with Mexico used the trail. In 1825 the merchant Manuel Escudero of Chihuahua was commissioned by New Mexico governor Bartolome Baca to negotiate in Washington for opening U. S. borders to traders from Mexico. In 1835 Mexico City had sent Albino Pérez to govern the department of New Mexico as Jefe Politico, New Mexicans had grown to appreciate the relative freedoms of a frontier, remote from Mexico City. The rebels defeated and executed governor Albino Perez, but were ousted by the forces of Rio Abajo led by Manuel Armijo. The Republic of Texas claimed Santa Fe as part of the territory north, in 1841, a small military and trading expedition departed from Austin, Texas representing the Republic of Texas and their president Mirabeau B. Their aim was to persuade the people of Santa Fe and New Mexico to relinquish control over the territory dispute with Mexico. Having knowledge of the recent political disturbances, they believed that they might be welcomed by the faction in New Mexico. Known as the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, the Texans encountered many difficulties and were captured by governor Armijos Mexican army under less than honest negotiations

10.
Buffalo Bill
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William Frederick Buffalo Bill Cody was an American scout, bison hunter, and showman. Buffalo Bill started working at the age of eleven, after his fathers death, during the American Civil War, he served the Union from 1863 to the end of the war in 1865. Later he served as a scout for the US Army during the Indian Wars. One of the most colorful figures of the American Old West, shortly thereafter he started performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. He founded Buffalo Bills Wild West in 1883, taking his company on tours in the United States and, beginning in 1887, in Great Britain. Cody was born on February 26,1846, on a farm just outside Le Claire and his father, Isaac Cody, was born on September 5,1811, in Toronto Township, Upper Canada, now part of Mississauga, Ontario, directly west of Toronto. Mary Ann Bonsell Laycock, Bills mother, was born about 1817 in New Jersey and she moved to Cincinnati to teach school, and there she met and married Isaac. She was a descendant of Josiah Bunting, a Quaker who had settled in Pennsylvania, there is no evidence to indicate Buffalo Bill was raised as a Quaker. In 1847 the couple moved to Ontario, having their son baptized in 1847, as William Cody, at the Dixie Union Chapel in Peel County, the chapel was built with Cody money, and the land was donated by Philip Cody of Toronto Township. They lived in Ontario for several years, in 1853, Isaac Cody sold his land in rural Scott County, Iowa, for $2000, and the family moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory. In the years before the Civil War, Kansas was overtaken by political and physical conflict over the slavery question and he was invited to speak at Rivelys store, a local trading post where pro-slavery men often held meetings. His antislavery speech so angered the crowd that they threatened to kill him if he didnt step down, a man jumped up and stabbed him twice with a Bowie knife. Rively, the owner, rushed Cody to get treatment. In Kansas, the family was persecuted by pro-slavery supporters. Codys father spent time away from home for his safety and his enemies learned of a planned visit to his family and plotted to kill him on the way. Bill, despite his youth and being ill at the time, Isaac Cody went to Cleveland, Ohio, to organize a group of thirty families to bring back to Kansas, in order to add to the antislavery population. During his return trip he caught an infection which, compounded by the lingering effects of his stabbing and complications from kidney disease. After his death, the family suffered financially, at age 11, Bill took a job with a freight carrier as a boy extra

11.
United States Army
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The United States Armed Forces are the federal armed forces of the United States. They consist of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, from the time of its inception, the military played a decisive role in the history of the United States. A sense of unity and identity was forged as a result of victory in the First Barbary War. Even so, the Founders were suspicious of a permanent military force and it played an important role in the American Civil War, where leading generals on both sides were picked from members of the United States military. Not until the outbreak of World War II did a standing army become officially established. The National Security Act of 1947, adopted following World War II and during the Cold Wars onset, the U. S. military is one of the largest militaries in terms of number of personnel. It draws its personnel from a pool of paid volunteers. As of 2016, the United States spends about $580.3 billion annually to fund its military forces, put together, the United States constitutes roughly 40 percent of the worlds military expenditures. For the period 2010–14, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the United States was the worlds largest exporter of major arms, the United States was also the worlds eighth largest importer of major weapons for the same period. The history of the U. S. military dates to 1775 and these forces demobilized in 1784 after the Treaty of Paris ended the War for Independence. All three services trace their origins to the founding of the Continental Army, the Continental Navy, the United States President is the U. S. militarys commander-in-chief. Rising tensions at various times with Britain and France and the ensuing Quasi-War and War of 1812 quickened the development of the U. S. Navy, the reserve branches formed a military strategic reserve during the Cold War, to be called into service in case of war. Time magazines Mark Thompson has suggested that with the War on Terror, Command over the armed forces is established in the United States Constitution. The sole power of command is vested in the President by Article II as Commander-in-Chief, the Constitution also allows for the creation of executive Departments headed principal officers whose opinion the President can require. This allowance in the Constitution formed the basis for creation of the Department of Defense in 1947 by the National Security Act, the Defense Department is headed by the Secretary of Defense, who is a civilian and member of the Cabinet. The Defense Secretary is second in the chain of command, just below the President. Together, the President and the Secretary of Defense comprise the National Command Authority, to coordinate military strategy with political affairs, the President has a National Security Council headed by the National Security Advisor. The collective body has only power to the President

The Santa Fe Trail was a 19th-century transportation route through central North America that connected Independence, …

Image: Map of Santa Fe Trail NPS

A rest stop along the Santa Fe Trail.

Connections along the Santa Fe Railroad—Map shows the principal regular stops on the AT&SF mainline, including such famous cattle drive destinations as Dodge City. It is no accident that most of those Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexican towns were also first serviced by the Santa Fe Trail.